Politics, photos, and excellent reporting

Thanks to this class I'm looking at news articles with a more discerning eye. Take for example, Teaching Good Sex by Laurie Abraham in Sunday's New York Times Magazine. How in the world did Abraham to get the Friends School outside of Philadelphia to let her sit in on their sex ed class and interview the students and the teacher? Very provocative article and very impressive reporting. The same goes with Eliza Griswold's article on the downside of natural gas, The Fracturing of Pennsylvania. Another example of thorough reporting.

Now, on to politics. I, too, believe there is too much of an agenda in the news. It's hard to find the facts. The primary source, the politicians themselves, are filled with spin.  I live in liberal Massachusetts and mostly get my news from The New York Times, Boston Globe, NPR, and The New Yorker--all liberal publications. My brother lives in conservative Singapore and gets his information from Wall Street Journal, Economist and other right-leaning publications. When we get into political discussions, which we try to avoid at all costs, it's like we live on separate planets from each other. And I believe, maybe naively, it's because of our reading material. The leanings in each of our publications is like a gas leak--invisible to the eye but when mixed with an ignitor, flammable.

And for those photos, wow, can you imagine a paper without them? On a hurried morning, they are what I scan. In today's Globe, two photos struck me. The first is of this officer spraying Occupy Wall Street protestors with pepper spray. The spray looks a little funny like it was a doctored a bit but I believe it. It looks like he's watering his lawn. Very powerful.

And then for metaphor, this photo spoke to me:

The article is about a receded Texas lake that when the water dried up artifacts such as this gravestone were discovered. The line right through the middle of the gravestone of a one-year-old child speaks volumes about drought, fragility of life, global warming, the future. That's not easy to convey in a 300 word article.